Top Indian blogs in English

This is one of the two articles published in 2011 with detailed observations on how the Indian blogging was faring. Much has changed since then but it is interesting to know how blogging was ruling the social media at that time and Top Blogs team was working hard to manually select blogs and then rank them in three categories. By the way, this was the first full-fledged compilation of top Indian blogs in English by Indian Top Blogs. The categorization was later discontinued and a single listing of top blogs was produced and called the Directory of Best Indian Blogs. You can visit the latest edition of the directory of top Indian blogs at this link.

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We are pleased to announce the results of June Indian Blogosphere Survey, 2011.

Out of over 5,000 blogs that we screened, we ended up with 98 outstanding blogs. These have been ranked as platinum (14), gold (18) and excellent (66) blogs.  Congratulations to the bloggers whose blogs have been ranked by us or figure in the ‘Best Indian Blog Directory’!

As in Feb, we made teams and feverishly looked at of over five thousand Indian blogs. Out of them, about a thousand blogs met our screening criteria based on numeric parameters. We put them into the process of close scrutiny and came out with a list of about 200 blogs.

As before, our main criterion has been the quality of content, followed by design and regularity of posting. We particularly observed quality of language, selection of subject, effort made by the blogger, consistency, display and readability, supplementation of text with graphics, placing of elements, cleanliness [vis-a-vis clutter] and overall visual appeal. Individual commitment and effort got special treatment when we finally sat together to manually screen the top blogs for final selection and placing them into the three categories. Popularity was no criterion at all in our ranking. 

In June Indian Blogosphere Survey, we have categorized our best blogs into platinum, gold and excellent blog categories. We did not want silver ranking, as we realized that calling a blog a silver blog branded the blog as inferior to gold blog rather than highlighting that the blog is one of the best blogs in our opinion.

The June Indian blogosphere survey is independent of February survey and some blogs have slipped in their ranking and a few have gone out altogether. Therefore, we have changed the ‘Indian Top Blog’ icon by adding 2011 alongside the earlier icon to make it specific for this year. 

As we announced earlier, a ‘Best Indian Blog Directory’ is also under creation. If your blog is listed in the directory, you can put an icon for that in your blog. We’ll put that icon here on IndianTopBlogs once we release the directory. 

A few words about the directory of best blogs.

The blogs that met our basic filtering criteria and were selected in our first round of manual examination were all good blogs and some of them were at par with the best in one or the other parameter. We have included all such blogs in the ‘Best Indian Blog Directory’. We are open to expanding this directory as and when we come across good blogs, without waiting for the next blogosphere survey. With the publication of this dynamic directory, we are closing the ‘spotted!’ listing of blogs.

Though we do not hanker after publicity, we would request you to spread a word regarding our rankings if you find our effort worth it. It will help us get more submissions for ranking and possibly more feedback for improving the ranking. Do submit good blogs known to you by emailing them to us at kp.nd.2008@gmail.com.

If your blog did not find a rank in our June Indian Blogosphere Survey and you feel your blog is better than those ranked by us, do write to us. We will consider all such inputs in the next survey. 

Two, if you want your blog to be reviewed in detail by us, do write to us. We have given the details about submitting blogs for review here. [The link was removed later, when reviewing of blogs was stopped.] Do submit only one blog at a time. We may take some time in reviewing your blog as we have to clear a huge backlog.

Happy blogging!


Even more details on our June blogosphere survey

Well, the task of ranking blogs for quality was enormous. Consider four of us giving marks to each blog on each of the many criteria, mixing marks given by each member, filtering blogs based on these criteria, examining the remaining blogs again and screening them for more stringent criteria. Then, after the moderator had examined the blogs to correct obvious mistakes in filtering, all of us sitting together evening after evening for discussing each of the selected blogs and ranking them. In fact, screening of blogs from over five thousand to two hundred was much easier than the detailed examination later on.

Even after this big exercise, we are sure that many will not agree with our ranking. During our discussion itself, we found that individual members sometimes ranked a blog differently when they re-examined it after a month: partly due to changes in the blog itself and partly due to a change in perception of the examiner. So subjective is human nature!

Coming to rejections, let us first tell you that many good, even great, blogs got filtered out due to various reasons. For example, offshoots of commercial sites and forums had to be rejected. [We still have a few such blogs in our lists that have some commercial content, but as we explained sometime earlier, making money from blogging does not exclude them from the list, only being primarily commercial does.] Some blogs that were ranked higher in Feb 2011 lost their position or were rejected due to low level of activity in these blogs of late. Blogs that had major connectivity issues had also to be rejected. 

We also made comparisons among blogs of a particular category as we realized that we could not use the same criteria for blogs on music, a teen’s ramblings, technology, current affairs, etc. Some good blogs might have been left out due to tough intra-category competition. We hope to resolve this in our next blogosphere survey.

Despite all the labor and the realization that we are nowhere near perfect, we are deeply satisfied with our work. We can claim that we were fair to the core and spent a lot of time and energy in ranking the blogs. It also gives us pleasure [and allow us to share that with you] that this blog ranking exercise generated two by-products of value: one, a directory of quality Indian blogs. Many of entrants in this directory may not be in our platinum, gold and excellent blog categories due to various factors explained above, but they are indeed good blogs. The other by-product is our collective understanding of the blogosphere. This experience, we believe, will keep improving blog ranking in future and will also enable us to generate more tips for composing quality blogs. Our tips, anyway, are not cut-and-paste tips, and our discussions on blogging matters for over six months now have given us more insight into blogging.

Too much blah-blah from our side, isn’t it? So we stop. Amen!